Beam me up Spocky

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Film After overdosing on kids’ flicks in recent weeks it was time to see some big people’s films during the last week of April (yes, wrote this then didn’t get time to post).

First up was JJ Abrams big budget reboot of Star Trek. I’ve never been a great fan of Star Trek on TV or the big screen but am a fan of Abrams work and actor Zachary Quinto, who plays the conflicted, violent and mostly evil Sylar on one of my favourite shows, Heroes.

Quinto is perfectly cast as Spock and battles to keep his emotions in check in a manner not dissimilar to the cold and calculating Sylar. I half expected to see him raise a finger and slice open Kirk’s head.

Australia’s Eric Bana is suitably menacing as the tattooed baddie Nero and Chris Pine as Kirk is better here than he was in the recent low budget flick Bottle Shock. The one thing that really bugged me though, and this is a pretty crucial part of the plot, is the time travel, black hole, space time continuum jump scenario, resulting in current and future versions of Spock.

In most TV shows (such as Heroes), altering events while time travelling can have serious, history-changing repercussions. And if one character has a present and future version, why don’t others? At one point future/old Spock mentions to young/current Kirk he did grow up with a father who was proud of him. So what happened to that version of Kirk senior?

My husband, a Star Trek fan, looked at me like I was a moron when I said I didn’t really get the whole time/space/future jumping business but I was pleased to note The West’s film editor Mark Naglazas had similar feelings about that aspect. Shannon Harvey also noted he didn’t like the time travel element in STM this week.

I think JJ Abrams is totally obsessed with time travel. Just look at Lost, and from memory even his first major TV series Felicity had some sort of whacky future fast forward. Lost’s time jumping has really aggravated me but having invested the better part of four years in the series I feel compelled to keep watching, knowing the end is nigh in 2010.

The best thing about Star Trek is that Abrams only has finite amount of time to work with; imagine how much time jumping he’d squeeze in if he had five seasons of Star Trek top play with!?

I also went to a preview of the big screen adaptation of Paul Abbott’s British TV series State of Play, starring Russell Crowe in the role played by John Simm. Despite being in desperate need of a loo break I stayed on the edge of my seat for almost the entire two hours, even though the last 15 minutes felt rushed and were a bit of a let down.

Newspaper journalists in the audience chuckled at the 80s technology used by Crowe at his Washington newspaper, where the bottom line and keeping the owners happy has started to impact on investigative journalism.

Don’t think I have ever heard of a story so major that the presses are held until well after midnight being written in, what, about five minutes. Then sent direct to the presses minus any subbing or layout by pushing “send”. Clichéd old school journo types battle the new media whiz kids with moral lines about sharing information with police getting very muddied.

Look out for Jason Bateman, almost didn’t recognise him as a wired, ultra-sleazy PR guy caught up in the political maelstrom. Worth seeing when it opens at the end of May